Dr. Taylor joined Marshall University on July 1, 2018, as the Provost and Senior Vice president of Academic Affairs.

Taylor, who has a background in mathematics and computational physics, has held a faculty appointment at Austin Peay since 1996, when he joined the university with a B.S. in physics from Austin Peay (1990), and an M.S. (1991) and a Ph.D. (1995) in engineering science from the University of Tennessee Space Institute.

Taylor has served as dean at Austin Peay since 2008, except for 2013-15, when he served as the institution’s interim provost and vice president for academic affairs. This year, he has been on temporary leave from the dean’s position to serve as Austin Peay’s first presidential fellow, conducting research and working directly with the university president on strategy and policy related to Tennessee’s formula funding model for higher education.

As dean, he worked with department chairs to add new degree programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Taylor also led initiatives to increase enrollment and improve student success, resulting in a more than doubling of the number of graduates in the college.

While interim provost, he developed and implemented strategies to ensure Austin Peay remained Tennessee’s leading institution in the state’s outcome-based funding formula, which bases funding for each higher education institution on its number of graduates. He established two programs—an out-of-state scholarship and the guaranteed community college graduate scholarship—which were later replicated by other universities in the state.

After the first year of using recruitment strategies put in place while Taylor was interim provost, Austin Peay experienced record growth of more than 30 percent in its freshman class. In addition, both years he served as interim provost, Austin Peay made the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Great Colleges to Work For” Honor Roll for Confidence in Senior Leadership and Collaborative Governance.

Prior to his appointment as dean, Taylor was the chair of the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy from 2000-08.

His research interests are in applications of biologically inspired algorithms or “soft computing” methods such as neural networks, fuzzy systems and genetic algorithms, and during the summers of 1996, 1997, 2001 and 2002, he served as a NASA Faculty Fellow at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. He also has conducted research at the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, working on pulse-coupled neural networks for military and space-based applications.